"Toward Lasting Learning? Enhancing Non-Interactive Teaching in Inquiry-Based Authentic Science Lessons"

Abstract:

Supporting lasting learning is a central goal in education, particularly in schools where long-term retention is crucial for students' academic success. However, recent large-scale achievement studies have highlighted that students often struggle to acquire and retain knowledge. Generative activities can facilitate the meaningful construction of coherent mental representations, yet this effect is modest and heterogeneous.

In three experimental classroom studies in inquiry-based authentic physics lessons with secondary students (N = 1,251), we investigated how to optimize the generative activity of non-interactive teaching, in which students verbally explain contents to a fictitious, non-present peer. We tested whether this activity can be enhanced through drawing, by distributing throughout the study phase, or by sequentially adding retrieval practice. We assessed students' conceptual knowledge and monitoring accuracy regarding both immediate and lasting learning after eight weeks.

The results revealed that combining non-interactive teaching with drawing improved students' immediate conceptual knowledge, likely due to increased task interest and more complete explanations. In contrast, distributing the activity throughout the study phase did not yield additional benefits. No main effect emerged for the sequential combination of non-interactive teaching and retrieval practice. However, exploratory analyses revealed that retrieval practice supported lasting learning when prior generative processing was of low quality—that is, when students’ explanations were incomplete, less elaborated, or inaccurate.

Together, the findings demonstrate that non-interactive teaching can be systematically optimized to support learning in authentic science lessons. Carefully designed generative activities—combined with retrieval practice—offer a promising approach to fostering lasting learning in secondary science education.

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